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Italian the lazy way | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 3904 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 17 of 53 27 December 2014 at 5:44pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Oh, dear! This is going to be the parrot poem all over again, isn't it? In sixth grade, a few months into French classes, our textbook taught us a stupid poem about a parrot called Coco that says "cocorico". 18 years later, it's still stuck in my head.
That's probably true. One of the reasons some cards are a lot easier the second or third time around is no doubt because I've picked up new words and actually know their meanings instead of infer from context. Misconceptions will probably iron themselves out in a similar way.
Buffy is clearly awesome in any language! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 3904 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 18 of 53 29 December 2014 at 7:26pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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After ten days of playing around with various things, albeit mostly Anki and DuoLingo, I feel like I have made immense progress. I suppose there is always a huge progress in the very beginning, because when you don't know anything at all it doesn't take much effort to almost infinitely multiply your knowledge, but I was expecting subs2srs to be quite the uphill battle at first, since it's obviously not at all graded for beginners.
Aside from an astounding number of cognates, which I am immensely grateful for, I have found a couple of words to be careful with.  Fermare, for example. This word has popped up several times, and it has nothing to do with closing anything, like one might expect from French. Instead it seems to mean "to stop". Sentire is another example that comes to mind. It pops up constantly. From French one might assume it means "to feel", which it certainly does, but it also seems to mean "to hear", as opposed to the second French meaning "to smell". It all has to do with "sensing", of course. That's what my music deck looks like, by the way. I am too lazy to make a new card type with a photo of the artist for every new batch of cards, but I found that I like having a picture to look at while the music plays. At the beginning of this ten day period, I mostly found myself drawn to familiar and useful verbs: be, do, go, come, want, can Right now, I'm finding myself particularly drawn to the future tense, which I'm seeing a lot in the singular... at least with -ere verbs. parlerò parlerai parlerà Unsurprisingly essere seems to have the same irregular root as French être: serò serai serà In this time, I have covered the entire first episode of Buffy l'Ammazzavampiri stagione tre at least once:  I am going to let the cards mature another day or so before watching the entire episode unaided for the first time, though. Looking back at these past ten days, I feel a longing for a basic learners' grammar reference. I know that all of the information is available online, at my finger tips, but want to be able to find myself a quick overview on a broad topic when I have a question and I have yet to find a site that does this to my satisfaction. But, I'll keep looking because I'm cheap. Speaking of cheap, I've started going through what resources I have available at home. I have some films that are either originally (at least mostly) in Italian (e.g. Il Gattopardo), are dubbed in Italian and come with poorly corresponding subtitles (e.g. The Hobbit), or are dubbed in Italian and come with almost perfect subtitles (e.g. The Best Offer) I extracted the video and subtitles from The Best Offer this evening, but since it doesn't have English subtitles (yet it has perfect Italian subtitles for the hearing-impaired - curious!) I won't be using it right now.  I'm thinking of introducing it after a few episodes of Buffy l'Ammazzavampiri as a translation exercise. Each card has only a front, and the first time I come across a card I have to create a backside. Something like that. I don't know, yet. It's an idea for the future. Now, I leave you with some closing words about language learning in general:  2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 3904 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 19 of 53 31 December 2014 at 2:56pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Felice anno nuovo a tutti!
I watched my first un-subtitled Italian episode of Buffy l'Ammazzavampiri today. I know it's largely convert's zeal, but WOW, if I ever decide to pick up another [living Indo-European] language I am doing subs2srs again! WOW! All right, I know that what I do understand is a very narrow segment of the language. Not only do I know the series I am watching well, but I have also practised these particular sentences several times. I am aware that it doesn't translate to general comprehension. It is what it is. After ten days of reviews, I can watch one episode and get the gist of almost every single line, while understanding a fair number of lines word-for-word. One episode, forty minutes, I know. What strikes me isn't that it's some superior method for amazing progress, but rather how big a motivation boost it is to be able to watch and understand something you enjoy. Getting there was such a long long road for me in French, because I first had to get to that general comprehension level I am currently lacking in Italian. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 3904 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 20 of 53 01 January 2015 at 12:04pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Yesterday, I wrote about the effect that subs2srs has had on my motivation. Today, I would like to show it to you.
Being able to create literally hundreds upon hundreds of fun and useful cards for Anki in less than five minutes of total effort has motivated me to be lazier. Enter AnkiFox, a plugin for Firefox that lets you quickly add words or sentences from the internet to any of your Anki decks. 
 Most of you who use Anki are probably pros compared to me, but I mention it anyway for those of you who, like me, are not pros and have spent far too much time typing and alt-tabbing between windows, followed by anger and frustration because half of the time after alt-tabbing the software stops accepting the ever crucial composition button on your keyboard layout... ok, maybe that last one is just me. If we have any SRS novices out there who are curious about the card layout, this is what it looks like in action (I don't really have any Italian cards of this type yet, so you'll have to settle for Breton):  It's not a very original card layout, I'll admit. So far, it's the only one, aside from my TV series and music cards, that I find tolerable though. The front has either a word or a phrase, sometimes there is an image or sound-file, and finally there is either a translation of a word or a word in the target language to add correctly into a space in the phrase. On the back, it has the answer, often a sentence for context, and sometimes some comments on grammar. --- In more Italian news, I spent a couple of minutes learning prepositions on DuoLingo this morning, before doing my subs2srs flash cards. I am still reviewing the first episode, but I'm moving into episodio due. I was delighted to find that from my new cards there were many that I understood at first listen without looking at the Italian subtitles. Apparently, I can even pick out and understand every single word in new phrases if those phrases are: "Do you want something to eat before the killing? You must be hungry." 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 3904 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 21 of 53 02 January 2015 at 11:19pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Today, I read a blog article called 5 cose da fare per migliorare la tua vita. Roughly 1300 words on self-improvement. My first article in Italian! I had to look up a few words in most of the short paragraphs, but I understand enough that it's still me reading the article in Italian, as opposed to me simply piecing together a rough sense of the meaning with the dictionary.
What surprises me the most is that it doesn't really take more effort than reading French did when I moved to France, after five years of studying French in school. That said, it probably wasn't a very complicated or linguistically sophisticated article. I'll try my best not to get over-excited about this "win", since I'd probably en up buying a novel a bit too soon for such a lazy/fun/relaxing experiment, struggling with it, and losing motivation. I also gave in and peeked a bit at verb conjugation (website tip: conjugazione.it) because my "must know everything right this second" sense has been tickled something terribly by subs2srs this past week, first by the present tense of all those useful verbs, then by the future tense, and most recently by the passato prossimo (present perfect), which pops up all the time on Buffy l'Ammazzavampiri and in my music cards — e.g. ho imparato già ad amarti senza più riserva alcuna ("I have already learned to love without any more reservations", Annalisa - Senza riserva). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4971 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 22 of 53 03 January 2015 at 5:11pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Meraviglioso testo! i read it, too, and I am confident about my reading level for Italian. Italian always seemed
easier than French I only did French first due to priorities. Thanks. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 3904 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 23 of 53 04 January 2015 at 2:36pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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BUFFY I still love my Buffy l'Ammazzavampiri cards. The fact that they don't always correspond with what is said bothers me less and less. Even with those rare difficult cards that differ greatly from the subtitle content, I can usually make out what is being said with a few listens and sometimes typing what I hear into Google Translate.  When I watched this series in French, I enjoyed noticing the little differences between the dub and the English original. With the Italian version, I notice more of those differences, since I have the English subtitles present and thus don't have to rely on my memory. My current favourite Italian dubbing change: Cordelia thinks that Scoobies should wear something more sporty while slaying as "il look Rambo" is out of style. In the original, she suggests something from Tommy Hilfiger. In the Italian, she wants something "tipo Baywatch magari"? Yes, you may now imagine barely dressed Pamela Anderson Lee and David Hasselhof running through a graveyard, holding red flotation devices, and leaping over tombstones. MUSIC Anki is proving a very effective way of creating earworms, but I nevertheless really enjoy my music deck. I will need to fill it up with something new soon, though. Can someone recommend me some hard rock or heavy metal in Italian that isn't in one way or another related to Rhapsody? Epic fairy dust dragon slaying renaissance fantasy warrior progressive centaur whatevertheycallitthesedays metal isn't necessarily my favourite genre. DUOLINGO I am still somewhat enjoying DuoLingo, albeit not nearly as much. Chances are that I will drop it sooner or later. I am up to Level 6 and have finished the conjunctions and prepositions. It's probably good practice, but it's becoming a bit of a chore, which is what I'm trying to avoid. LEARN Italian WITH LUCREZIA I watched My grandma makes tagliatelle and Italian summer recipe: torta salata mediterranea. I quite enjoy this type of video right now. They're short, they're entirely in fairly easy Italian, they're subtitled, and I pick up a few new words here and there. CLASSIC SRS As I have started reading articles in Italian, I decided to also start up some a bit more classic SRS with Anki. With French and Breton, if I come across a phrase with something that I want to learn actively, I make a card out of it. Now, I've started doing the same with Italian.  There's a moderate to high risk that I'll abandon this deck fairly soon, though, since I want Italian to be my "refresher" away from my usual language chores. NATIVE MEDIA I started reading some native blog articles this week. Three in total. I've read about self-improvement and sports psychology, a total of 2600 words. Being able to do this so soon is a huge motivation (and ego!) boost. LO HOBBIT I've been haunted by how easy reading articles has been, so I had a peek at an e-book sample of Lo Hobbit. I was really pleasantly surprised to find that I could definitely read it without resorting to parallel texts, so I spent another 8€ on Italian (up to 23€ now for one e-book and 16 hours of television) and downloaded the full e-book. Because I'm a little bit crazy, I'm making it a read-along. Last year I ran a multilingual Harry Potter read-along with modest success. There were several amongst us who finished our books, but it was hard to get people to share their progress and to create a feeling of being on a team of sorts. I think this was largely due to the fact that we were all spread out on two fora, multiple blogs, and some people who had simply mailed in or left me a Facebook message in order to join. So, this year I'm making it easy on myself and simply making a secret Facebook group for friends and friends of friends who want to read along in their own target language. (If anyone feels like joining us, send me a PM with your FB info - preliminary start date set for February so that book orders can arrive). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 3904 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 24 of 53 11 January 2015 at 2:45pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Salve ragazzi! Mi piace ancora l'italiano, ma non ho molto tempo da vendere da ora in poi. Una settimana fa ho comprato un libro in bretone, Ar gariadez vaen, e non leggo in fretta in bretone, e da iero ho un grande libro dalla libreria, Belle du seigneur a leggere. Il 25 gennaio inizio leggere Lo hobbit in Italiano. Leggerò un capitolo per due settimane con alcuni miei amici che, come me, vogliono imparare una lingua. Loro leggeranno il libro in altre lingue. BUFFY Over the past week, my cards for the first episode have matured so much that I don't even look at the screen because having a picture trigger my memory feels like cheating. The cards are very easy even without visual aids. I have, however, looked both at the pictures and occasionally the subtitles when it comes to the second episode. It was significantly more difficult than the first episode on account of a lot of arguing.  Even so, I still decided to watch the episode without having looked twice at about 100 of the cards. It wasn't more difficult to keep up with this episode, sans subtitles, than the last one, so I think that in the future I will continue being pretty cavalier about letting cards mature before progressing. It's more fun, and I'm all about the fun (if you knew me, you'd know how ridiculous a statement this is in any other context). I made a little video for a friend to show her what subs2srs looks like in action. For the curious: here is it. MUSIC My music cards have matured "too much". I seriously need to find some decent Italian music. STANDARD SRS As suspected, the cards I made from reading Italian articles bored me to death. I deleted the deck and decided to focus on having fun. DUOLINGO I'm on level 7. At the beginning of the week, I felt like I was going to quit DuoLingo because it was getting to be a bit of a chore. Then the time and measure skills turned out to be quite fun, so now I am on a roll again. LANG-8 I wrote my first entry on Lang-8, and I'm quite happy with it. I don't know if I'll use the site often, but it was nice to get some verification that my written Italian isn't terrible. Mind you, I can't say much, but I want what I do say to make some semblance of sense. NATIVE MATERIALS Read two articles this week, roughly 1,200 words in total. I also started listening to a podcast on conquering one's body through mental exercises. I was far too tired to try to keep up for more than 7 minutes, but I actually could keep up for 7 minutes, which is a huge motivation boost. As for The Multilingual Hobbit Read-Along on Facebook. We are starting on January 25 and we are reading one chapter every fortnight. If you want to join us, send me a PM. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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